High five from Spurlock

CHARLOTTESVILLE – There are many things with no right or wrong answer. An all-time all-ACC basketball team is one of them.

Fans and writers can bickeras much as they want, but usually you don’t get actual current players involved.

SEE RELATED:

But on a whim, given that I was having a pretty entertaining conversation with freshman forward Tristan Spurlock at Virginia’s basketball media day today, I asked him to give an all-ACC team from the last decade.

“Oh man,” he said. “Last 10? Can I go all-time?”

Any history buff isn’t going to say no to that, especially to a guy who grew up in the D.C. area and is about as ready as anyone could possibly be to get his college career underway.

So, sure, he can go with his all-time favorite players.

“Let’s go Ralph Sampson at the five – huge Ralph Sampson fan,” Spurlock said. “At the four, I’m a little biased. I don’t know. I might go … there’s so many good fours in the ACC. I’m actually a huge Al Thornton fan. I get compared to him a lot, so I’m going to go with him at the four.”

(Note: Mention of TGAT – The Great Al Thornton – assured the entire starting five would get blogged. But, really, it only gets better).

“I’m going to go with Len Bias at the three,” Spurlock said. “I have a Len Bias jersey and I’m a big Len Bias fan. At the two, I’m going to go Michael Jordan and at the one, I’m going to go – oh, Jay Williams. I was a Duke fan when I was little.”

Really, in their primes, that’s a superb team. Jordan, Bias and Sampson could be on anyone’s all-time team and not get criticized, and Williams was an amazing player in college. It’s the sort of team a 40-year-old (with Christian Laettner or Tim Duncan in place of Thornton) probably would come up with and make a good case for.

But Spurlock wasn’t done.

“For my honorable mention, I’m going to go Vince Carter, and I’m a big Greivis Vasquez fan,” said Spurlock, who was a teammate of Vasquez’s at Montrose Christian three years ago.

One other honorable mention: Former Virginia guard Sean Singletary. “I got to play against him this summer,” Spurlock said. “I did not know how special he really was. Sean could score a basketball with eight people guarding him.”